When citizens are more afraid of police than criminals, you’ve got a problem.
Everyone now knows St. Louis cops shoot black people with sickening callousness, but the reasons aren’t well understood by people who don’t live there, hence this article. Other cities, of course, also experience police brutality; and the twin problems of police militarization and trigger happy cops gunning down unarmed citizens is nationwide in scope, but St. Louis is somewhat of a unique situation and this article focuses on what’s going on there.
You can’t talk about police problems in St. Louis without talking about race, because that’s at the heart of it. You should think of St. Louis as a southern city in a southern state, because it is.* I have some personal knowledge of this, because I lived in Missouri for a while, many years ago. That area of the country never really broke loose from Jim Crow, and it still shapes civic life there today.
(* Missouri had slaves before the Civil War, and although it stayed in the Union, many Missourians harbored Confederate sympathies and some fought for the Confederate cause; in St. Louis, in 1861, Union troops fired on pro-secession rioters killing 28 people.)
King County, Washington, has roughly twice the population of St. Louis County, yet the latter has many more municipal governments. There are at least 55 police departments in that county. This was deliberate. The extreme balkanization of municipal government there was (and still is) used as a tactic to disempower blacks and keep the city and its environs segregated.
The city of Ferguson reflects this. Demographically it’s 67% black, but has never had a black mayor and 5 of its 6 city council members are white. How is this possible? Partly because only 12% of Ferguson’s blacks vote, but also because council districts are arranged to make electing blacks difficult. This pattern is repeated across St. Louis County.
The Ferguson police department has 50 white cops and 3 black cops. That’s part of the problem with policing in Ferguson, as in most of the county’s other balkanized municipalities. St. Louis County has two big police departments, City of St. Louis PD and St. Louis County Sheriff, just like here, and another part of the problem is the little departments like Ferguson get their castoffs. When a cop gets run out of St. Louis PD or the Sheriff’s department, he often finds employment in one of the dozens of smaller police departments available to choose from.
Why are those departments willing to overlook these troubled cops’ pasts? For budgetary reasons. Hiring them saves money on training, and that’s a big deal to small city halls strapped for funds. Consequently, St. Louis’ cop rejects get recycled into the metropolitan area’s poor minority neighborhoods, which thus would have lower quality police even absent a racism component.
Whether there’s a racism component was something I was unsure about — because my Missouri experience was in a college town and I’ve never actually lived in St. Louis, that was a long time ago — until I began reading the personal accounts of blacks who have lived there, including this one that ran in the Seattle Times a couple days ago:
http://seattletimes.com/html/opinion/2024370719_acerobinsonopedferguson25xml.html
These stories leave me in no doubt. Even without overt racism, the institutionalized de facto segregation and disempowerment of blacks in the St. Louis area would be troubling, but personal testimonies like these make clear that overt racism continues there to this day, and cops at the street level in those balkanized communities systematically treat blacks in a discriminatory way.
This past week saw two fatal police shootings of blacks in that area, one of an unarmed teenager who may or may not (we don’t know yet) have scuffled with a cop who stopped him for walking in the middle of a street (the worst effect of which was to impede traffic), the other of a mentally disturbed man with a small knife whom the police gunned down within 15 seconds of their arrival. I submit these blacks would not be dead if they had been white, and that they’re dead because the white police officers who killed them put a cheap value on their lives because they were black. I can’t prove that, but it screams out from everything we’ve learned about these two incidents and the environment in which they occurred.
What is the solution? How do the people living in those communities stop the police from snatching their children’s lives for little good reason? There are some broader issues here touching on the crying need to deprogram all of America’s tense, trigger-happy cops and reprogram them to approach the citizens they serve, not necessarily with less caution, but at a minimum more respectfully and with more respect for the irreplaceable of human life, across all races and social statuses. Locally in Ferguson, the city’s non-voting minorities need to register to vote (if they haven’t) and then vote. That’s already happening; one of the most gladdening things seen in the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting is the voter registration tables set up by local volunteers, and the efforts being made to get their neighbors to vote. That’s the only way they will get a mayor and city council that represents them, which in turn is the only path to a police department that is responsive and accountable to the community and its citizens.
For the people of Ferguson heretofore abused and mistreated by their own police, nothing is more important than using the power of the vote to elect people who will listen to them and act on their concerns. If they don’t, nothing will change in Ferguson, Missouri.