On Saturday, September 15, a day and night of disruptive, but not destructive, protests of the verdict in the Jason Stockley murder case ended in a path of smashed shop windows in the University City Loop. According to eyewitnesses, the smashup was started by masked young white men, unknowable because masked in the night, who took advantage of the element of surprise to escape. A photojournalist on assignment for The St. Louis American happened to catch one of the first culprits on film. The sudden eruption of breaking glass hours after the protest proper was over hasn’t yet registered as a surprise to the young black hand-holding couple captured precisely in the nanosecond when they have heard a sound but don’t yet know its source and are looking towards it, though wanting to let their gazes rest on each other and this moment in the movement that is about to be shattered. The source of the breaking glass is a young masked white man (you can see some of his skin) speeding east on the north side of Delmar away from the scrum of police and protestors and the smashup to follow.
Plenty of other people followed in the smashup, which veteran protestors said was initiated when police stepped up their aggression, after being pegged with a volley of water bottles – thrown by masked white men. Four of the five adults arrested on felony charges were local black people in their twenties.
This property destruction action – just broken glass; shopkeepers were grateful they weren’t looted – was confused in the public mind with the peaceful disruptive protest actions that preceded it (and that provided the smashup boys with their opportunity). It’s become such an inevitable pattern – disruptive protest of police unaccountability ends in distracting property destruction – that it begs an analysis of the relationship between disruption and destruction in the police accountability movement, starting from Ferguson.
A protest reporter for The American came back from the first days of the Ferguson unrest in August 2014 with some observations that were difficult to substantiate. She said she saw white people (mostly men) who didn’t fit in, were very aggressive and violent, but were not accommodating to a reporter trying to get them into her stories. There were plenty of other people and things to write about, so we wrote about them.
More detail emerged when Gov. Jay Nixon came to Rev. Traci Blackmon’s church, Christ the King United Church of Christ in Florissant, the day he called the Missouri National Guard into Ferguson. This was a moment of turbulent change, when powerful white men had no choice but to listen to less powerful (in material terms) black women. Though Nixon barged in more or less unannounced to Rev. Blackmon’s church wanting to announce something, the pastor told the governor that he was not in her church to talk, but to listen.
But he didn’t listen.
Rev. Blackmon forced the governor to listen to one of her parishioners who lived in Canfield Green Apartments, where Michael Brown was killed. This parishioner told the governor he needed to stop the white people who knew how to come in and out of a trail where you can walk into Canfield Green from Jennings. She said that four white men got out of a car (a two-door yellow Chevy) in Canfield and set a dumpster on fire, then two of them drove off in the yellow Chevy, while the other two went up the hill towards Jennings.
Another local man added that there were other unfamiliar white people in Canfield who “brought Molotov cocktails to the party.” Few in Ferguson knew this phrase at the time, but Molotov cocktails would become a signature part of the trashy, destructive coda to many disruptive, but peaceful, actions in Ferguson.
Nixon didn’t listen.
Amazingly, he did not tell them that he had investigators who wanted to know everything they knew and would be talking to them when the new Unified Command was in place.
Either he was too nervous to listen, or he did not care what plain-spoken black people had to say, but the governor made absolutely no reference to the extremely valuable intelligence that had just freely been given to the state. Instead, Nixon recited a set piece on the U.S Constitution and our freedoms of speech and assembly. It was the kind of thing governors do for school children.
St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson was in the church and acted upon the opportunity. Thanks to Dotson, through the woman who lived in Canfield Green, the Unified Command soon had regular access to the concerns of black people in Ferguson who did not love the cops, but also did not like these strange white people teaching their children how to play with fire. Good intelligence work prevents crime, and it’s impossible to prove a negative, so it’s not possible to know what harm was prevented through this collaboration.
There were at least two sources of white fire-starters in Ferguson. One is a self-styled revolutionary communist group (name withheld to deny them promotion) based elsewhere that loves to crash urban disasters, the others were locals from the City of St. Louis – sometimes called “anarchists,” though that’s not fair, because the term of reference is too vague and many self-identified anarchists in the movement do not play with fire. One unnamed group of local arsonists whose address was a post office box in St. Louis, published a ‘zine, “Summer in the City” (the summer of 2014), in which they describe taking delight in setting fires in trash cans and looting stores while protesting in Ferguson. “We tried to move the dumpsters to the street, but they were too heavy so we set them on fire,” reads a typical passage in the September-October 2014 edition. “We looted liquor and oil out of a busted up shop.” The writer describes, with disappointment, a Molotov cocktail that failed to ignite the roof of a chop suey shop. The very experience of Ferguson, to this writer, felt like arson: “Ferguson was a whirlwind, and I’m still a bit lost. It was like a Molotov cocktail exploding all at once, within me and outside.”
We have come a long, long way from Black Lives Matter to arson as a kind of orgasm for young white people. That is one journey of Ferguson, and it leads to the smashed windows on the Loop on Saturday night.
We publish a community newspaper dedicated to informing and empowering the black community in St. Louis, so white arsonists are far from our coverage model and only come within our notice at times of crisis protest. At those times, our tiny staff has much work to do covering legal outcomes, protests, and local black people’s perspectives. Also, we were broadly sympathetic to the Ferguson protest movement, which was adamantly opposed to what protest leaders described as a “good protestor vs. bad protestor” narrative. For these and other reasons, we withheld reporting this story. An editor at The American did discuss the role of white arsonists in Ferguson several times on CNN, the first person to do so – at first, to the disbelief of CNN anchor Don Lemon, who accused him of making excuses for black criminals.
In the build-up to the Stockley verdict, The American reported on the barricades that went up around the courts and police headquarters. The story focused on protestor claims that this was an act of proactive aggression by the authorities, but to be fair the article had to acknowledge that past protests had involved property damage, which could justify taking precautions. The American also had a source who was tracking out-of-town troublemakers and concerned that St. Louis could become a destination for disaster-chasers, as Ferguson had, and these concerns were briefly included in that report, published on August 30.
The old guard of outsider arsonists (all white folks) was not visible in St. Louis on Stockley verdict weekend, as they had been in Ferguson. The masked white men observed striking the first blows in the Loop smashup were not known by longtime local protestors, who have come to know the old guard Ferguson hangers-on like creepy aunts and uncles they despise but see at every family reunion.
The demographics of the people arrested on the Loop on Saturday complicate the “white leader-black ally” model typically observed of destruction actions on the fringe of disruptive protests. St. Louis County Police, which made the seven arrests associated with the smashup, could not identify two people because they are juveniles. Of the five adults arrested and charged with rioting and/or looting, there is only one white man from Freeburg, Illinois. His Facebook page reveals a short, young, unmasked man – he also was unmasked at the time of his arrest – who looks nothing like the masked white guys who took the first swings and tosses at Loop shop windows. The others are local black people in their twenties, two men and two women.
Obviously, the state needs to prove its case before these individuals are to be considered guilty of property damage. Also, it’s common for the individuals who start a destructive action to benefit from the element of surprise and disappear into the night, as eyewitnesses described happening on Saturday night. The leaders escape, and some of the followers get caught by the cops.
There are other explanations for why the masked white men who frequently start destructive actions frequently get away, whereas the black people who pile on end up cuffed on the pavement. Police have undercover personnel working every protest, and it’s a safe bet they wear masks (can’t beat a mask for a face disguise) but are known by sight by uniformed personnel. Protestors always claim – they claimed on Saturday, though without providing any evidence – that police agent provocateurs started the smashup. Of course, the police department would scorn and deny the question if asked, but a St. Louis police officer speaking unofficially made a telling observation: “We’re stupid cops until you need us to be pulling off a vast conspiracy in real time, and then we’re James Bond geniuses.”
Certainly it’s true that anyone with any disposition towards police or police accountability could show up to any protest with a mask and a bat and, for any motive or for no reason at all, bash in a few shop windows then run off into the night.
Property damage is a public relations nightmare for a protest movement. However many times protest leaders say – truthfully – that their peaceful protest had nothing to do with the property damage that ended the night, the story always reads – truthfully – that a peaceful protest ended in destruction. Needless to say, a broken shop window does not leave behind a grieving family, like a person killed by a police officer. But over and over, people with no position of authority with respect to the police – in the case of Loop shop owners, people who likely support the police accountability movement – are left with a headache, a mess, and new expenses at the end of a protest.
Virvus Jones, former St. Louis comptroller and a member of The St. Louis American editorial board, insists the broken glass is both symbolic and intrinsic to the disruption. Smashing windows without looting is indeed property damage and could get someone hurt, but so far it’s just amounted to glass on the sidewalk and an aggravating setback for a shop owner. Virvus reminds us that to see white people freaked out about broken glass just reminds hard core protestors from almost-all-black North St. Louis how (going to talk plain like Virvus would) fucked up shit is. “In North St. Louis, you could think broken glass is a wildflower,” Virvus said. “The movement said it’s going to make St. Louis hurt until it feels the way black people feel.” It’s also more difficult to respect the sanctuary of nice shiny stores if you live in the black half of the city that does not have very many nice shiny stores. Virvus was transformative as a St. Louis power player in forcing minority inclusion on projects of scale with city tax subsidy. He is one of many black leaders in St. Louis who tried to bring Moses to the mountain – they tried to address the region’s racial inequities by empowering black people. They realize that they mostly failed. The young leaders on the streets today know that and seem prepared to go the hard way, since the region’s leaders would not accept the easy way. They will hurt the regional economy to be heard. They will smash the mountain down to Moses’ size if that’s what it takes to make things equitable.
Principled protestors who stay late enough at actions to see chaos ensue almost always claim (they claimed it on Saturday) that the police started it by their overly aggressive policing – not as embedded provocateurs, but as enemy combatants. They say the police escalated their protest response tactics, and then protestors who were already fed up with the police killing people and getting away with it decided to smash something since they couldn’t smash a cop and survive. A veteran protestor who saw much of the damage done on the Loop on Saturday (but not the first blows; he was too close to the scrum), when asked to identify the perpetrators he saw by race, gender, and whether he had seen them before, would only say, “They are pissed-off people tired of police escalating at a protest against police killings.” There remains that determined resistance to a “good protestor vs. bad protestor” duality. In the protestor narrative, at its core, the police are bad and protestors are good, even when driven to do destructive things by the police.
If you step outside of the protestor narrative, and entertain a modest conspiracy theory, it appears as if the police could be playing the protestors to their own advantage. You could argue that the most aggressive cops are skillfully playing the most aggressive protestors to tarnish the police accountability movement in the public eye. This would be a conspiracy of opportunism, rather than coordination; that is, you don’t work cooperatively with your enemy on a desired outcome, you simply predict your enemy’s response and provoke accordingly. Police also have plenty of personal motive to get more physical with protestors by the end of a long action, because they have been the targets of verbal abuse and even (police who work protests will always will tell you) savage threats for hours. And so police act up and provoke the edgy crowd that stays the latest at protests into a rage, so they start destroying things. The police then make some arrests, get some protestors off the streets and into the criminal justice system (“where they belong,” you can put in the cops’ thought bubbles). And, in so doing, they perpetuate the narrative that has been winning for the police in the public eye – “protest ends in destruction” – rather than achieving what the movement is supposed to be about: “protest ends in more police accountability.”
This pattern is a win, not only for the police, but for the out-of-town white arsonists and any hard-left local white kids who want to destroy the police state. They may dream and ‘zine of destroying the police state, but in the meantime wouldn’t it be cool to burn down some little piece of the police state? Even if it’s just a chop suey stand in Ferguson. They welcome a relatively safe space to scream at cops and skirmish with cops, where cops may flood their face with pepper spray and give them a hard body slam when making an arrest, but the cops can’t beat them senseless or kill them because their actions are being live-streamed. Listen to the young white kids who published the city ‘zine about their wild times setting fires and fighting cops in Ferguson: “The combativeness toward the police was outright and it was prolonged. People wanted war; they wanted to fight to win against the cops. There were conversations I was part of and overheard where people were talking about how to keep this up.”
