“All of us are required to respond to this,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said Monday to mourners at the funeral of Michael Brown at Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church and to television viewers all over the nation and beyond. “And all of us must solve this.”
What we must solve, Sharpton said, is how we do police work in the United States. Sharpton was not warmly welcomed by all of the young people who started the protest movement in Ferguson – one young protestor said, “I don’t need a 60-year-old man to lead me around my own neighborhood” – but he spoke sharply on point in his eulogy. For the dramatic events that unfolded in Ferguson since a white police officer fatally shot an unarmed black teenager on August 9 may have “started a national conversation about race,” as we have been told in countless media reports, but at root here is unacceptably bad police work that must be changed.
A police officer should not pump at least six bullets into an unarmed teenager in broad daylight. The body of a dead young man should not be left on the street in plain sight of family and friends for more than four hours while police slowly go about their crime-scene business. Evidence about a police-involved shooting should not be withheld and manipulated as we have seen Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar and St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch do in this case.
And the conduct of the police officers under Belmar’s command that repressed the mostly peaceful protests would be unacceptable in any theater of war, let alone on the suburban streets of America. We are amazed that we watched on national television as police officers pointed assault rifles directly at peaceful protestors and (off-camera) initiated countless acts of alleged violence – including firing tear gas canisters at families with children – without reprimand. How some of these men, including Belmar himself, still have police jobs in our community is beyond belief.
Now that we have the region and world’s attention, what do we do to move toward positive change? Many of the mostly young people who propelled the Ferguson protest movement (with great assistance from their adept use of social media) have started to talk about organizing toward systemic social change. “A movement means we’ve got to be here for the long haul,” Sharpton said at the funeral, “and turn our chants into change, our demonstration into legislation.”
We do need to register voters, vote our full strength and leverage our influence on policy decisions affecting our communities, which includes our police departments. There is a strong backlash about voting coming now from our impatient young leaders – many have said that it was a police officer who killed Michael Brown, not poor black voter turnout. While this is true, and we believe that Officer Darren Wilson deserves his day in court, we should not ignore the obvious. Officer Wilson was protected by Chief Jackson, who was protected by Mayor James Knowles, who was voted into office – and who should be voted out of office at the earliest opportunity.
We commend the outraged young people, in particular, who are demanding changes in policing and the penal code to ensure protection for the rights of everyone. Thanks to them, we are now at an inflection point in this region – at a unique moment for a region that is struggling, in a low-growth economy, to become more innovative and more competitive for the human and financial capital necessary to grow and prosper. The stakes are high for all of us, and we need to better negotiate and act to address the corrosive conditions that plague large segments of the people in this region. Our futures are inextricably bound together, and if we continue to ignore those trapped in the margins of society and fail to act in meaningful ways, we will suffer the consequences.
