There has been some muffled talk that there will not be an indictment and thereby Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson will not be held accountable for the shooting death of Mike Brown, an unarmed black teen.
The community’s righteous demand for an indictment of Darren Wilson has not diminished one iota. In fact, the outcry has only gotten stronger for an indictment of the officer who fatally killed Mike Brown, a black teen in Ferguson, Missouri. The demand has reverberated nationally.
One of the most popular chants during the past Weekend of Resistance went like this: “Indict! Convict! Send that killer cop to jail! The whole damn system is guilty as hell!”
The refrain was embraced by thousands of concerned citizens in St. Louis and from around the country, who participated in a myriad of marches, rallies, acts of civil disobedience and teach-ins. The diversity of the people was both powerful and inspiring. Many races and ethnicities, ages, political persuasions, faiths and unaffiliateds, labor, elected officials, entrepreneurs – all raising their voices as one for real justice.
We demand and expect an indictment of Darren Wilson; the community should not soften its expectations based upon past actions by prosecutors.
Jerryl Christmas, local attorney and one-time candidate for St. Louis prosecuting attorney, eloquently lays out the charade by the St. Louis County prosecutor. Christmas exposes the playbook for “how to not get an indictment” in a recent St. Louis American commentary. And yes, it’s obvious to anyone paying attention to the legal theatrics of Prosecutor Bob McCulloch that he doesn’t want to charge Darren Wilson and has cowardly passed his responsibility onto the grand jury.
Behind the scenes, government officials are reaching out to individuals and groups who they feel may have some influence in their communities should they need embedded voices to quell any unrest. Like McCulloch, these officials are hiding their complicity with a justice system that is – as the chant says – guilty as hell.
Their time would be better spent transforming a broken system into one that’s fair and just, regardless of who the victim or victimizer is; they should not be wasting time with intermediaries who didn’t create the problems we now must confront.
No individual or organization, no matter how high their position or how deep their ties in their communities, can guarantee peace in the streets should Darren Wilson not be indicted. As St. Louis blogger Bgyrl for Life reminds us, “We’re sitting on a ticking time bomb, on borrowed time … about to go nuclear.”
The only people who can make this right are the ones who have built and maintained this unjust system rooted in racism and class oppression. The governor, mayors, prosecutors, police, courts, legislators and their functionaries must all be held accountable for a system that allows an unarmed, black youth to be shot multiple times – twice in the head – and then lay dead in the streets for four and a half hours.
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