The Taking In Of Ferguson, 1

Brilliantly said Madame.  All should take heed of your entreaty, for it is maybe the only way we can move forward peacefully out of our isolated deadlocks.  We are all “others,” and in this disconnected society, we all want—no, NEED—to be heard, to feel that we matter, that some measure of good preservation and good change can be made.

I was going to write about how the economic squeezing of people in the plutocratic economy mean that they need to come out on Black Friday/Black Thanksgiving Night (an original negative connotation to the shopping spree has now often become a neutral or even a positive) as many of the bargains are real because the stores are taking advantage of the foot traffic that really does need those bargains to have any chance of pulling through another Christmas season.  Sort of holiday version of the Walmart spiral of low wages/low prices.

But like you, I recognize there are other matters to attend.  Therefore, I am announcing today a:

Special Four Part, Four Consecutive Days, Series of the P&H From The Professor.

“The Taking In Of Ferguson, 1, 2, 3, 4.”

Reading anything less than all four parts will give an incomplete and possibly inaccurate picture. There are important things that need to be said, and quickly, which is why they are being dispensed in rapid fashion. 

Alas, if only other and probably even more societally urgent matters could get the public’s and media’s attention…

People in a busy, information overloaded world want to make snap judgments about particulars without all the facts, without considering contributing factors, or even the history and background that mold, in your words, “thinking, perception, and judgment.”

Let’s begin by addressing that.

CONTRIBUTING FACTORS

Police and Prosecutors

Most police forces in America today are structured quite problematically.

It begins with the very lexicon, and how we perceive them and how they perceive themselves:

At one time we called them peace officers, who worked in tandem with justices of the peace.  Yes.  To keep the peace.

Then we moved on to calling them police officers.  Purpose?  To keep people and places safe.  Not as good or gentle as peace officers, but okay.

Now, although we still refer to them as police, we more often use the broad term law enforcement officers, to include state police, sheriffs, etc.  Purpose?  To enforce laws, including property rights, and, especially, enforce the desires of those who sit at the top of the power structure.

Their civilian oversight?  Effectively none.  Members of the military report to a civilian Secretary of Defense and a civilian President, but most local police have at best a loose structure of accountability to civilians.

Then we isolate the individual officers, and make them feel alone.  They work their days by themselves, the lone wolves of law enforcement.  The reduced money in this plutocratic economy means there are usually not enough resources to hire two officers to ride in the same patrol car in low to medium risk areas, let alone cover the reduced area one or two could get to by walking the community.

Think what this means.  No partner.  No one to talk to, no one to get close to, no one to soften the hard edges, no one to reaffirm your humanity with. No check on emotions or actions.  No one to have your back.  No one who can call for backup while you handle an incident.  How vulnerable and edgy you’d be every time you go into a dicey or even just unknown situation.

Think about that the next time you see two law enforcement cars stopping so the occupants can talk to each other.  It’s a human need that is missing from their everyday work lives, and they try to get in some small snippets to partially compensate. 

We are very far from community policing.  There are not enough officers to take the time to get to know and meaningfully interact with citizens.  Fear, suspicion, distrust of the unknown, etc., often result between citizens and police because of this lack.  Disconnection is bred.  Without the confidence and trust from the citizens, the job of the police, especially detectives, becomes exponentially harder.  After a while, precincts can de-evolve into a fortress and surge mentality.  And very much an us vs. them outlook, or even as occupying troops suppressing a heatedly simmering native insurgency.

Of course, body cameras would help things, but that level of transparency seems to be a ways off.  Indeed, in too many localities, it is illegal to video a law enforcement officer performing his or her duties. 

The difference in training, equipping, outlook, and expectation between civilian and military police is stark.  Military police have very few incidents of discharge of their weapons.  They handle things quite well without doing so. They also often attract higher caliber individuals than civilian departments.   

Ironic then, that more civilian police departments have been getting all sorts of surplus military equipment from the federal government, raising fears of a police state among the aware.  When one has military toys, one is constantly tempted to use them.  That police can seize cash and property from suspects without having to prove a crime further contributes to the reservoir of resources that can be designated only for equipment—and military style equipment gets the strongest interest.

Police departments with military equipment can start to think in terms of “force projection,” and “battle,” and “occupation,” and “crushing resistance.”  And the individuals in those police departments, many of them frustrated from being denied entry (for any number of reasons) into the military, can itch to be part of an “operation,” or a “war.”

Without redress, it bodes ill for the already struggling American democratic experience.

It’s a fact:  Prosecutors don’t want to prosecute the cops they work with.  From murder to even just involuntary manslaughter, cops are generally not charged when they kill a citizen.  They are given wide (sometimes VERY wide) latitude if they believe (or at least state they believe) their life was in danger.  Since it is THEY, the cops, that get to make that “determination,” and usually no other law enforcement officers are around to weigh in even if they wanted to (see above), most prosecutors let it go.  Especially for departments that are too small or resource strapped to afford adequate internal review/investigation divisions.

The Stage Where Things Act Out

For too many communities in America today in the new plutocratic economy, there are plethoras of problems that intersect and interact, with second, third, fourth and further effects.

The impact of poverty, lack of economic opportunity (jobs in general and living wage jobs in particular), and marked income inequality affect the community as a whole, the base from which the citizenry come.  Sociologists and criminologists can tell us well that where those conditions exist, crime and problems go up as well, often dramatically, further stressing the resources of that community to address those crimes and problems and the fallout from them.  The lack of money/resources to devote to police departments, who suffer in salaries (and attracting top people), training, and professionalism (and maybe respect) as a result, is sometimes nearly crippling.  A community without much economic opportunity has upticks in aberrant behavior.  Policing such a community tends to jade and even authoritarianize the policing members.  If there is marked racial disparity, as there is in Ferguson, this is accentuated even more.

Towns like Ferguson, where 22 percent of people live in poverty, are today the result of malicious unofficial housing industry practices and decades of government policies that—however well intentioned they may or may not have been—had a decidedly racist outcome.  Those policies and practices limited African-American citizens to certain areas of major cities and metropolitan areas. 

The federal government, deliberately or de facto, participated in the segregation of communities.  It built segregated public housing and provided subsidies and loans to developers if they agreed to build segregated neighborhoods in a number of cities—greater St. Louis among them.  Local authorities both jumped on the bandwagon and pre-empted things by passing ordnances (or directing their inspectors and enforcers) to prohibit liquor stores and other supposedly degenerate businesses from establishing in many white neighborhoods, only permitting them to set up where African-Americans lived, thereby overconcentrating such establishments and further undermining African-American community economic and social integrity and wholesomeness.   Utility companies carried out anything-but-benign neglect in many black neighborhoods as well. 

White flight—the moving of residences by white people as “those people” moved in to the neighborhood—contributed heavily to things also.  For all of the above and more, today, 2/3rds of Ferguson is black.

FERGUSON

Fairness, justice, education (public education defunding in Missouri is heavy; in Ferguson, it is extreme), opportunity—Ferguson’s indicators in all of them have pointed downward.

There is reliance on ticketing for Ferguson government income, like many towns in the new plutocratic economy where the wealthy and corporations no longer pay anywhere near their former share of supporting the cost of government.  Inflated traffic tickets, court fees, and fines for minor violations make up a large part of not only the Ferguson police budget, but Ferguson government’s budget in general.  Citizens perceive that as harassment, which only feeds the seething resentment.

The resources poor department can’t hire many top quality officers.  It also apparently can’t afford tasers (non-lethal weapons), as it only has one, and Wilson stated he doesn’t like to carry a taser (for flimsy reasons, even though military police carry them all the time).

Ferguson lives an apartheid existence.  It has a white government (only one black city council member, at last count), a nearly all white police force and political power structure (mayor, school board, etc.), and practices that clearly favor the white residents, workers, and businesses.  For instance, during the rioting, white businesses got protected.  Black ones didn’t.

Ferguson responds like an apartheid government would, with military like actions.  For instance, during the initial protests in August, it met them with military equipment —  mine-resistant armored vehicles, assault rifles, and combat fatigues.   Even US Attorney General Eric Holder, a corporate lawyer who will soon go back to corporate service,  remarked that by responding in force, local law enforcement needlessly antagonized the situation, risking further erosion of the community's trust.   Things still didn’t change much after that, leading to an investigation by the US Department of Justice into the practices of the Ferguson Dept.

MISSOURI

The incestuous--excessively close and resistant to outside influence--nature of Missouri politics and Missouri police and prosecutors meant that the lack of an indictment was effectively a foregone conclusion.  Which is undoubtedly why Missouri’s governor prepped state police and the National Guard to already be there.  They weren’t worried about an indictment setting the African-American majority city aflame with anger, but rather the probable lack of one.

One of the US Senators from Missouri is a former prosecutor.  Her rather odd statement about the case seemed to non-Missourians to further demonstrate  how very very (overly?) close the law enforcement network is in Missouri.