FERGUSON PART III: THE FIRE THIS TIME

“No good ever came of mass emotion. The audience that’s easily moved to tears is as easily moved to sadistic dementia.”  — P.J. O’Rourke

 

We’d have to be hermits not to know what happened in Ferguson, Missouri when the no-bill from the grand jury came in on Officer Darren Wilson on the 24th. It was what many had predicted.  And, as also predicted, the embers from that conflagration flew a good distance, and sparked protests elsewhere, though none yet so violent as at Ground Zero.

This week I attended a large law enforcement training function where a police chief said, “It would be hard to imagine how this could have been handled worse in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.”  What he was talking about was law enforcement’s failure to make certain things clear to the public about what the preliminary investigation was already revealing.

Back in 1972, when they first pinned a badge on me, I was told that we were the keepers of the secrets of the community.  We owed the suspect/defendant and the victim alike their rights to privacy.  We learned to say, “No comment” to reporters.  “It will all come out in court.”

What I realized early on and have preached to brother and sister cops in the decades since is that this doesn’t work when the cops themselves become the accused.  An accusation of wrongdoing that goes unanswered is seen as a silent plea of nolo contendere, which translates roughly from the Latin as “we do not contest the charge against us.”  The general public doesn’t see much difference between that and a plea of Guilty…and “pleading nolo” generally results in a penalty remarkably similar to what would accompany an actual Guilty verdict.

On the evening of the 25th, on CNN, I watched Anderson Cooper speak as an impartial voice of reason alongside Mark O’Mara, who has performed much the same function for that network since he became a resident specialist there on legal issues.  The clarity with which Missouri prosecutor Robert McCullogh explained the evidence the grand jury reviewed leading to their decision was ignored by those who came to Ferguson to act out – they started running toward their long-planned violent goal before they could have possibly heard it. Their minds were made up, and they didn’t want to be distracted by facts. But the reporters had to listen – cramming sleeplessly on the long transcript of what the grand jury had heard, or at least, what their research assistants gave them in digest form – and could no longer ignore the reality.

A four-way dialogue included O’Mara, Cooper, legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, and Sunny Hostin.  Toobin, apparently, had been convinced by the conjunction of the fact evidence and the eyewitness testimony of several African-American eyewitnesses with the account of the officer who pulled the trigger, and who spoke publicly last night for the first time on ABC. Only Sunny Hostin, who had been one of the leaders of the CNN “lynch the defendant” mob in both the Zimmerman trial last year and the Wilson hearing this year, disputed the facts that had come into evidence. The other three seemed incredulous, and she looked almost embarrassed to find herself still defending the now-discredited narrative of helpless child gunned down by racist cop.  “He was unarmed,” she all but screamed, and seemed oblivious when O’Mara explained that when Brown was killed, he was lunging for the cop’s gun for the second time.

We humans are a very tribal species, and this matter is clearly a very tribal thing. But, since the wise release of the grand jury minutes, more people are trusting their brains.  From African-American Wall Street Journal writer Jason Riley comes this cogent analysis:  http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/jason-riley-the-other-ferguson-tragedy-1416961287-lMyQjAxMTI0MjI0NTQyMDU1Wj. (link may be locked behind a pay wall)

The public is beginning to wake up to the fact that they’ve been bamboozled. Many were sickened and horrified that the body of Mike Brown, unquestionably and irretrievably killed by the last bullet that hit him, lay in the street for hours before being removed to a less-undignified setting. Answers are coming out, altogether later than they should have: http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/dailyrft/2014/09/funeral_director_explains_why_michael_browns_body_stayed_in_the_street_for_hours.php

“The truth will out,” said Shakespeare.  In this case, tragically, the truth should have come out far sooner.

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