Ferguson, Missouri and the Growing Trend of Police Brutality
On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was fatally shot six times by 28-year-old Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. Brown, an 18-year-old African American male, was unarmed; he had been impeding traffic by walking down the middle of the street with 22-year-old Dorian Johnson when Wilson pulled up in a police cruiser. From this point on, the story diverges: one side claims that Brown attacked Wilson by forcibly shoving Wilson back into the cruiser and attempting to obtain Wilson’s gun; the other claims that Wilson had grabbed Brown by the neck and Brown had been trying to get away. In both situations, the gun went off and hit Brown, Brown and Johnson took off running, Wilson shot Brown, then continued to shoot 4 more times. According to eyewitnesses, Brown had turned around with his arms raised after being shot the second time.
But why was there such a massive public outcry? The interaction is relatively common between black people and police officers; according to one MSNBC report, “From 2006 to 2012, a white police officer killed a black person at least twice a week in this country.” Perhaps it was that Brown was unarmed and a prospective college student, or that he’d had his hands in the air. Or perhaps it was because his body remained on the sidewalk for four hours for all to see. In any case, the civilians of Ferguson reacted with protests; after the evening vigil on August 10, some people began looting and burning businesses. Over the course of the next few days, police reacted to protests with tear gas, rubber bullets, smoke bombs, and bean bag rounds in an effort to disperse the crowds. Journalists from the Washington Post and Al Jazeera were arrested for no apparent reason at all. The governor of Missouri gave poorly timed and poorly written statements that only inflamed the situation more, then declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew.
And the whole world watched it all unfold. The world is increasingly connected via social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as online news sources like CNN, the NYT, and Huffington Post. Tweets, status updates, Vines, and Instagram photos kept the audience informed of events as they occurred, while news sites published articles from a more distant perspective. Protests and sit-ins were held in over 100 cities in the US; hactivists of Anonymous organized cyberprotests and crashed city servers and computers. People from all over the globe criticized the police department’s dependence on firearms; even the United Nations urged the halt of excessive police force, calling out the bigger problem of “racial bias among law enforcement officials, the lack of proper implementation of rules and regulations governing the use of force, and the inadequacy of training of law enforcement officials.”
In an era of instant connectivity and access to the world’s news, injustice and bigotry are easily magnified to a national, if not international, scale. News feeds show an elderly Asian man beaten and arrested for jaywalking, because he does not understand English; an underage teenager, tased and stepped on, because he couldn’t roll down a broken car window when asked by an officer; an unsuspecting, innocent man brutalized by police officers who then threaten to have him fired if he reported them. The Internet provides an open floor for victims to speak out against police brutality, and the world is the audience. As more and more people become connected by technology, accounts of injustices will continue to emerge, and law enforcement officials will have no way to avoid them unless serious changes are made.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Ferguson_unrest
http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/19/us/ferguson-michael-brown-dueling-narratives/
http://www.thenation.com/blog/181332/strange-fruit-ferguson
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/29/us-usa-missouri-shooting-un-idUSKBN0GT1ZQ20140829
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/endless-march-police-brutality-7-stories-just-week?page=0%2C2