Politicians running for president during the long primary season held town hall after town hall where they counseled family members of addicts, spoke with compassion about the addicts in their own family, and called for treatment, funding, and understanding. This was particularly striking on the Republican side of things, a party more strongly associated with get-tough-on-crime rhetoric.
New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a former federal prosecutor, became something of a viral sensation for his impassioned calls for empathy in the face of suffering. He would discuss his mother’s own smoking habit on the trail, saying that when she got sick with lung cancer “no one came to me and said, ‘Don’t treat her ’cause she got what she deserved.’ ” Christie would also often speak of a friend who died of an overdose. “There but for the grace of God, go I,” he said. “It can happen to anyone. And so we need to start treating people in this country and not jailing them. We need to give them the tools they need to recover. Because every life is precious. Every life is an individual gift from God. We have to stop judging, and give them the tools they need to get better.”
Stop judging, and give them the tools they need to get better. Think of any other context where this is the guiding ethos of our crime policy.
Imagine a person commits a crime, perhaps even a violent crime, against you. Is this person a human being? A neighbor, a fellow citizen? What do we as a society owe that person? Could he be someone you know and love in the throes of addiction? Or is he a member of a group you’ll never encounter again? What dignity is due the perpetrator and the potential perpetrator? Do you and the perpetrator belong to the same country? This is the question before us. The question we’ve answered wrongly for too long.
Right now the person I conceive as my possible assailant does not inhabit the same Nation as I do. He is in the Colony, and our entire project for decades has been to keep him there. Subtly but unmistakably we have moved the object of our concern from crime to criminals, from acts to essences. It is the criminal, the bad guy, the irredeemable thug, around whom we craft our policy. We must keep him at bay. He is not a man who committed a bad act. He is not a full soul who did something horrible. He is the crime. He is a criminal. He is a subject of the Colony. Citizens can be full human beings; citizens can get second chances; citizens can be forgiven. Subjects are unforgivable.
In Ferguson on the third night of protests, I was out in the streets, broadcasting live. We’d rented a fenced-in parking lot to stage our show, on West Florissant Avenue, where protesters had been met by police with tear gas night after night. A few hundred yards away from where I was broadcasting, a tense standoff was developing between cops and protesters. As they had numerous times, the two sides stood staring at each other. Demonstrators chanted slogans and hurled occasional verbal invective. Cops in riot gear did their best to appear menacing. And then, as usually happened, someone chucked a plastic bottle filled with water, or maybe a rock, and then, boom! Out came the tear gas.
If you’ve never been teargassed, let me say it’s a truly vile experience. It feels aggressive. It makes you furious (or I should say, it made me furious). It makes you feel like the cops are there to fight you, and it makes you want to fight them back.
The gas chased the demonstrators down the block past our live location, and as I continued to broadcast, I could hear a bunch of protesters, mostly young people, running down the block, howling with anger and adrenaline. As I faced into the camera, with my back to them, a few of them saw me under the klieg lights, talking into a microphone along with my colleague Craig Melvin. They started chucking rocks.
“Hey, hey, hey.” Craig said sternly. He swatted a few away that were headed toward me. “Watch out, Chris.”
“Tell the true story!” a young woman yelled.
A young man with his face covered walked up and put his hands on the fence. “It ain’t just about Mike Brown no more. It’s about all people.”
I’m standing on one side of the fence, and he’s on the other. When we originally scouted the location, we liked the fence in part because it gave us some protection from the police, who the night before had fired a tear gas canister at an Al Jazeera film crew. But now the situation is reversed. Here I am, protected and privileged. And there he is on the other side of the fence. I’m gonna leave Ferguson in a few days, and he’s gonna be here with these same cops who just teargassed him.
He moved on. Another young man approached the fence. “You see how they do us out here? They treat us like animals.”
Are we part of the same political entity, he and I?
Do we live in the same country?
I’ll never see him again. I’ll never get pulled over by the Ferguson cops for failing to signal. I’ll never be stopped and frisked by the New York City police. Life is pretty damn good in the part of the Nation I live in. It’s quiet and peaceful. It’s prosperous, and it’s orderly.