The point is that none of the people administering this enterprise appear concerned that what they’re doing is a gross violation of their duty to their constituents. And when you ask yourself how this report came to be written, the reason for their nonchalance is evident. The damning pages of the report exist only because a seventeen-year-old black boy was shot and killed by a police officer, and because that shooting led to an uprising. That uprising in turn led to the DOJ getting involved, which in turn led to the investigation that produced this audit.
But how many other police departments are like the one in Ferguson? We happen to know of this one because of this young man’s death, because of the outrage and activism and klieg lights that followed that death. But Ferguson’s practices were hiding in plain sight for all to see for years. And in fact, when I talked to people in Ferguson, they didn’t think there was much that special about it. Go to any of the surrounding little municipalities around Ferguson in St. Louis County: Jennings, Florissant, Kinloch. A Washington Post investigation of the municipal court system in the surrounding towns found identical violations across the board.
This is what “the law” looks like in the Colony, where real democratic accountability is lacking, when the consent of the governed is absent or forsaken or betrayed, and when the purpose of policing and courts isn’t the maintenance of safety and provision of justice but rather some other aim. In north St. Louis County that aim is to produce revenue, the same aim of the British Empire’s customs regime in the American colonies.
But empires of old kept their colonies at a distance: Rome conquered the Gauls across the Alps. France ruled Algeria from across the Mediterranean. King George III dispatched troops across the Atlantic to administer the new world. In the United States in 2016 such distance does not exist: the “rough” part of Ferguson is maybe a thousand yards from the “nice” neighborhoods.
And so the maintenance of the Nation’s integrity requires constant vigilance. The borders must be enforced without the benefit of actual walls and checkpoints. This requires an ungodly number of interactions between the sentries of the state and those the state views as the disorderly class. The math of large numbers means that with enough of these interactions and enough fear and suspicion on the part of the officers who wield the gun, hundreds of those who’ve been marked for monitoring will die.
One of those deaths was a Staten Island grandfather named Eric Garner, who was choked to death by a New York cop in July 2014. In a small working-class neighborhood in Staten Island, Garner would sell individual cigarettes—loosies—which are illegal in New York.
In other words: Eric Garner, like John Hancock, was a merchant trafficking in black market goods. He was offering what the market demanded—a cheaper, unbundled, untaxed cigarette. And the government seeking to crack down on this offense harassed him—he’d been arrested twice for selling loosies in 2015 alone. Day after day Eric Garner simply had to swallow a particular type of ritualized humiliation. He had to take it. Every day the humiliation and frustration built within him.
On the day he died, Eric Garner was wrestled to the ground and put into a chokehold as he screamed with increasing desperation, “I can’t breathe,” eleven times, until he lost consciousness and died. All this was recorded as plain as day on a smartphone, which, before the police officer placed Garner in a chokehold, had captured his final protests:
Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it. It stops today. . . . Every time you see me, you want to harass me. You want to stop me [garbled] selling cigarettes. I’m minding my business, officer, I’m minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone. Please please, don’t touch me. Do not touch me.
Those final words could have been just as well addressed to a colonial customs officer:
Every time you see me, you want to harass me.
It stops today.
* In a later Department of Justice investigation, other eyewitnesses said Brown did not have his hands up and in fact was moving toward Officer Wilson and “appeared to pose a physical threat” to him. Ultimately the Department of Justice would conclude that the claims of Brown having his hands up were not consistent with the “physical and forensic evidence.”
III
Just after Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann fired his sidearm from the passenger side of a police cruiser, his partner Frank Garmback radioed dispatch. The neighborhood that the two officers were patrolling was, from the perspective of two white cops, poor, black, and violent. The park to which they had been summoned with word of a possible active shooter contains a memorial to two other police officers who’d been killed there in the line of duty.
“Shots fired,” Garmback told dispatch. “Male down, black male, maybe twenty.”
Maybe twenty. Perhaps a few years younger: eighteen, say. Or older: twenty-three. We do not know at what point it was revealed to them that Tamir Rice, whom Loehmann killed with two shots within two seconds of arriving on the scene, was, in fact, only twelve years old. He was not a man with a pistol. He was a boy with a pellet gun.
Loehmann would tell investigators he had had no choice: he saw Rice reach for his waistband and thought he was about to pull out a gun and shoot him. Loehmann wasn’t charged. He told the grand jury he was scared, and the grand jury believed him, as did the Cuyahoga County prosecutor who explained the decision: “Believing he was about to be shot was a mistaken—yet reasonable— belief given the high-stress circumstances and his police training. He had reason to fear for his life.”