Lieutenant: Stop being a smart ass and give me your ID.
All this was the context for what happened in Ferguson after Michael Brown was killed. I’ve never been anywhere in the United States that felt as revolutionary as those days of unrest in Ferguson. And it wasn’t primarily because of the protesters or the relatively small handful of (mostly) young men looting and setting things on fire. It was because the response of the cops was so heavy-handed, so panicky. In response to the outrage that poured forth on that summer afternoon, the police of Ferguson and St. Louis County mobilized as if for war: flak jackets, masks, helmets, camouflage, assault weapons, and armored vehicles. Men pointed their long guns at civilians who assembled for peaceful protest. Cops arrested and detained journalists who were charging their phones in a McDonald’s. They fired tear gas canisters indiscriminately. Bands of armed cops in full combat gear chased unarmed, peaceful protesters through the streets with guns raised.
Presented with a challenge to its power, an illegitimate regime will often overreact, driven by the knowledge that all they have is force. As Frantz Fanon wrote in 1961 about French colonialism, “In the colonies, the official, legitimate agent, the spokesperson for the colonizer and the regime of oppression, is the police officer or the soldier. . . . The government’s agent uses a language of pure violence. The agent does not alleviate oppression or mask domination. He displays and demonstrates them with the clear conscience of the law enforcer, and brings violence into the homes and minds of the colonized subject.”
On the streets of Ferguson, one could, in every moment, feel the police officers’ lack of legitimacy. There was nothing behind them; their guns provided their only authority. One threatened to Mace me on live TV because I drifted too close to him while broadcasting. And in his contorted face I could see how terrified he was.
There was one detail of Michael Brown’s death that protesters and residents alike kept returning to, and it wasn’t the “hands up” contention. It was the body. After the shooting, Michael Brown’s body lay in the street for more than four hours: bloody, baking in the hot August sun. His brains spattered on the concrete. Police would say they needed to be diligent with their forensic investigation, but to those who assembled in the minutes after Brown’s death, the inert, uncovered, disrespected body was the perfect symbol of the Ferguson police’s contempt. One resident who was there said it felt like the kind of thing the Mafia would do after a hit—just leave the body out for all to see as a warning—“or one of those cartels down in Mexico. Don’t they do that sometimes, kill someone and just leave him out like that?”
To desecrate the dead is to humiliate the living, and humiliation may be the most powerful and most underappreciated force in human affairs. The angry citizen can shout, and the terrified citizen can lock the doors, or flee, or move, or arm himself. But the humiliated citizen can neither express her feelings nor respond to the offense. For it is in the nature of humiliation that it happens at the hands of someone with greater power: the police officer who pulls over the young black man behind the wheel and wants to hear no lip; the corrupt bureaucrat who comes to inspect the businessman’s shop, looking for violations; the surly immigration official who goes through the immigrant’s belongings.
In Ferguson people were enraged at Michael Brown’s death and grieving at his passing, but more than anything else they were sick and tired of being humiliated. At random I could take my microphone and offer it to a black Ferguson resident, young or old, who had a story of being harassed and humiliated. A young honors student and aspiring future politician told me about watching his mother be pulled over and barked at by police. The local state senator told me that when she was a teenager, a police officer drew a gun on her because she was sitting in a fire truck—at a fireman’s invitation. At any given moment a black citizen of Ferguson might find himself shown up, dressed down, made to stoop and cower by the men with badges. Another anecdote from the DOJ report shows just how extreme the humiliation could be:
In the summer of 2012, a 32-year-old African-American man sat in his car cooling off after playing basketball in a Ferguson public park. An officer pulled up behind the man’s car, blocking him in, and demanded the man’s Social Security number and identification. Without any cause, the officer accused the man of being a pedophile, referring to the presence of children in the park, and ordered the man out of his car for a pat-down, although the officer had no reason to believe the man was armed. The officer also asked to search the man’s car. The man objected, citing his constitutional rights. In response, the officer arrested the man, reportedly at gunpoint, charging him with eight violations of Ferguson’s municipal code. One charge, Making a False Declaration, was for initially providing the short form of his first name (e.g., “Mike” instead of “Michael”), and an address which, although legitimate, was different from the one on his driver’s license. Another charge was for not wearing a seat belt, even though he was seated in a parked car. The officer also charged the man both with having an expired operator’s license, and with having no operator’s license in his possession. The man told us that, because of these charges, he lost his job as a contractor with the federal government that he had held for years.