Take just a moment to put yourself in that man’s position. You are sitting in your own car, minding your own business, and the next thing you know, a cop has accused you of being a child molester, pulled a gun on you, arrested you (for a series of ridiculous offenses), and thrown you in jail. For good measure, you’ve now lost your job.
We can all access some version of this feeling—even people of tremendous privilege can know the sting of humiliation. Take the simple example of a parking ticket. Just about everyone’s gotten one. You’ve been pulled over, and even if it’s completely justified, the sight of the cop or traffic agent scribbling on that flipbook causes a flood of neurochemicals. You experience a feeling of injustice, rage, and self-pity at the sheer unfairness of it all. And all this just for a parking ticket! A small citation and an entirely proper acknowledgment that someone, in his or her own small, innocuous, but irrefutable way, broke the law.
FOR SUBJECTS OF AUTHORITARIAN rule, humiliation is the permanent state of existence. “There is the man at the top,” Frantz Fanon wrote of his native Martinique, “and there are his courtiers, the indifferent (who are waiting), and the humiliated.” That’s it. In a colonial system, you can have power and be close to those with power, or you can be humiliated.
It was a sense of profound humiliation that gave emotional fuel to our own revolution. The humiliation that Britain visited upon the American colonists created such a powerful thirst for vengeance, it could be quenched only with extreme acts of ritualized public violence that tried to turn humiliation back on the oppressors. In 1769 a British customs officer named James Rowe was offered a bribe to look the other way as some goods were smuggled. He declined and chose to enforce the law, seizing the black market goods. “In response he was tarred and feathered, wheeled around the town in a cart, and forced to wear signs labeling him an informer.”
This happened in Salem, Massachusetts, a town that already knew a thing or two about rituals of public humiliation, but in the run-up to the Revolution, as the Crown attempted to crack down on smuggling, these outbursts of violent mob humiliation became routine. In Newburyport, a customs official was “put in the stocks, then paraded through town with a rope around his neck, hit with eggs, and locked in a warehouse over a weekend before being released.” In these moments the colonists could purge their own sense of impotence and transfer it to the agents of the Crown who had imposed it on them. Two centuries later Fanon would say that “colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”
To the Founders, the solution to the excesses of the Crown was revolution, then a republic. Of course, in the tortured and prolonged negotiations that ultimately created the Constitution, many of the original grievances—particularly the unreasonable searches and seizures, the lack of due process, and the heavy-handed quartering of soldiers in colonists’ homes—went unaddressed. Constitutional scholar Akhil Amar says that as soon as the final Constitution made its way out into the states to be debated and ratified, these omissions were immediately evident to the citizens engaged in the debate. Final ratification came only after they were assured that a Bill of Rights, which explicitly addressed many of the Crown’s egregious overreaches, was on its way. The framers thus included in the Fourth Amendment these words:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The existence of the Bill of Rights is an acknowledgment of the fact that democracy, by itself, is no guarantee against the potential excesses of the state’s police power. But on the ground in Ferguson, the Bill of Rights itself seemed to have no force. So the question that kept tugging at me, amid the tear gas and the sonic cannon, the shouts and protests and fires, was: What exactly was the “the law” in this heretofore little-known town? Whose authority held here, and why? Was it covered by the Constitution, or had we all managed to slip into some legal multiverse, where the standard rules, the ones our forefathers had fought and died for, that we pledged allegiance to as school children, simply did not exist?
As the DOJ report makes clear, the violations of the Constitution in Ferguson were extreme and systematic. Repeatedly, it calls the Ferguson police department’s patterns and practices “unconstitutional,” citing various amendments, from the Fourth to the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth, that are habitually violated by the conveyor belt of tickets, citations, court dates, fees, and warrants.
But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the DOJ report is how open and honest the city officials are about their police department’s purpose, how certain they seem that no one is watching them. Their comments suggest no winking and nudging, as one might find in the e-mails of, say, bankers on the eve of the housing crash or Enron traders before the bankruptcy. No ironic and knowing smiles. Just plain statements of financial goals, of dollars and cents. At one point the department started a new “I-270 traffic enforcement initiative” in order to “begin to fill the revenue pipeline.” The masterminds behind it warned that the initiative would require “60 to 90 [days] of lead time to turn citations into cash.”