Bedlam. Screams. The person holding the camera appears to hit the ground.
The camera returns upright and shows clouds of gas where the cops had been, with the lights glowing eerily behind them. The man who said he owns the house appears apoplectic. The police just shot a gas canister into his yard! He hops around the frame in rage, pointing down again at the ground “This my shit! This my shit! No, fuck that shit!”
A friend comes to escort him away from confronting the phalanx of cops as he continues to yell, “This my shit!”
Then: “You got all this recorded? This my backyard!”
“This what they do to us!”
“This my backyard!”
“This is our home. This is our residence.”
The man who appears to be the homeowner yells back to the cops, “Now go the fuck home!”
And then his friend turns to the camera and asks “Why do you think people say ‘Fuck the police’?”
He points back at the smoke still wafting in the background.
“This shit.”
WHEN A COP TELLS you to do something, do it. You hear this folk wisdom a lot, and it basically comes in two varieties. The first version is the central lesson of the Talk that so many African American parents give their children about how to survive a police encounter. Practical advice: Keep your hands on the wheel. Don’t make sudden movements. Say “Yes, officer. No, officer.” Et cetera.
The other version of this folk wisdom isn’t merely practical advice but reflects a deeper belief about the sanctity of police authority. It’s what lies behind the question you so often hear: Why didn’t she just do what the cop said? That inquiry comes unbidden every single time some incident of police violence is captured on video. Even when the citizen in question is, say, a sixteen-year-old foster child sitting at her desk in her classroom in Columbia, South Carolina, refusing to leave, only to be body slammed and dragged across the room. Why didn’t she just comply? and None of this would have happened if she’d just listened.
Section 29-16(1) of the municipal code of the city of Ferguson, Missouri, codifies this principle. It is a crime to “[f]ail to comply with the lawful order or request of a police officer in the discharge of the officer’s official duties.” As the Department of Justice would later show, the police much abuse this statute. Ferguson cops routinely issue orders that have no legal basis and then arrest citizens who refuse those orders for “failure to comply.” It’s a neat little circular bit of authoritarian reasoning.
In the video, the police order the onlookers to go back inside their homes. When the men in the yard refuse to comply, the police shoot tear gas at them. But can the police do that? Don’t you have a right to stand in your own front yard? Thirteen years before the Declaration of Independence, British member of Parliament William Pitt defended the rights of Englishmen to privacy in their own home. He declared: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England cannot enter—all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!”
In modern parlance: This is our home. This is our residence.
Like the vast majority of national reporters who descended on Ferguson in August 2014, I had no idea of the place’s existence until the night of August 9, when reports started circulating on Twitter that a young unarmed black man had been shot and killed there.
A few days into the unrest that followed, an Iraq war vet tweeted a photo of himself next to one of a cop on the streets of Ferguson, noting, “The gentleman on the left has more personal body armor and weaponry than I did while invading Iraq.” Not just that: the cops in Ferguson were clad in head-to-toe camouflage, as if the olive and sandy brown color scheme would help them blend into the McDonald’s parking lot they were patrolling.
The events on the streets of Ferguson in the days after Brown’s death didn’t outrage black people alone—it spooked people of all races. People who’d never had occasion to personally distrust the police wondered what the hell weapons of war were doing on the streets of this small St. Louis suburb. Politicians from both parties raised their voices to express concern, and to urge restraint, as the nightly news carried images of the kinds of disorder—tear gas, riot gear, clashes with police—that we normally associate with countries where the government sends in armed troops to put down dissidents, or where the possibility of all-out war does not seem remote.
Of course none of this would have happened, some argued, if protesters had done what they were told. If everyone had listened to the police, everything could have continued as it always had.
Societies operate through formal procedures of law and force but also through norms of compliance. Without those norms, nothing would function. Suppose you want to make a left-hand turn, but a traffic cop says you can’t. You don’t ask her to cite the law—you just don’t make the turn. You assume there’s a good reason for her to be blocking that street. Maybe there’s been an accident. Maybe there’s a fire. Or maybe there will be less traffic, and things will be more orderly, if she keeps you and everyone else from making a left at rush hour. Fine. Fair enough. Do what the cop says.
But as a principle of self-governance, particularly of American self-governance, “do what the cops say” is a pretty strange unofficial motto. This great land of ours, this exceptional beacon of liberty, was founded by men who, to borrow a phrase, refused to comply. Who not only resisted lawful orders but rebelled against the government that issued them. Colonists chased the king’s officers through the streets, caught them, beat them, tarred and feathered them, and wheeled them through town for all to mock and shame. As distant as it may seem now, that’s our national heritage when it comes to “lawful orders.”