2014: Michael Brown
Brown in a photo posted to Facebook in May 2013.
Source: Wikipedia
On August 9, 2014, Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed an unarmed, African American teen named Michael Brown on Canfield Drive in Fergusson, Missouri.
The national public reaction to the events, narratives, and legal proceedings revealed both a racially divided perception of policing practices and a systematic legal deference towards police officers and against black persons. As Colin Gordan writes in his book Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequity in the St. Louis Suburbs,
Brown’s death soon became a marker, shorthand for an array of urban and suburban ills, including persistent economic and racial segregation, a racial divide in economic opportunity and outcomes, police violence, and the uneven—carceral, custodial, disciplinary—citizenship claimed by African Americans. (2019, p. 131).
Besides being a perception “marker”, Michael Brown’s death demonstrated many of the challenges faced by African Americans due to the historical vestiges of slavery as well as racist zoning practices.
Ferguson, Missouri was incorporated in 1894, benefiting from the first wave of “white flight” from St. Louis City into the suburbs of the county. There were several succeeding waves of racial migration over the century that followed as the white population moved further and further out into the suburbs of St. Louis County; as a result of that continued white flight, Ferguson, Missouri’s racial makeup was over 70% African American according to the 2020 U.S. Census. This century of white flight shifted St. Louis County into a patchwork of as many as eighty-nine municipalities with eighty-one municipal courts and sixty-one separate police departments (Gordon, 2019, p. 140). Those different municipalities became the enforcement mechanism for racially informed zoning and housing practices with the poorer municipalities—often of a predominately African American makeup—being forced to compete for the funding necessary to continue to provide services to citizens.
This map shows the incorporated and unincorporated areas in St. Louis County, Missouri, highlighting Ferguson in red. It was created with a custom script with US Census Bureau data and modified with Inkscape.
Source: Wikipedia
Nowhere is this enforcement perhaps more counterproductive than in the growing share of St. Louis County municipal budgets reliant upon “fines and forfeitures” that contributed additional revenue gained by “enhanced policing efforts” (Gordon, 2019, p. 141). Ironically, municipalities targeted the very same community they aimed to serve via over-enforcement and policing to supplement their budgets. Effectively, the police enforcement of trivial violations of the municipal code—including such threats to public safety as “Manner of Walking along Roadway” (the pretext for stopping Michael Brown), and a long litany of “failure to comply” offenses that make it easy to manufacture an arrest out of virtually any police stop. (2019, p. 141).
Gordan points out that there is little justification for this sort of enforcement strategy of over policing as “fines for broken tail lights, sagging pants, improperly storing drywall, insufficient window coverings, or jaywalking do little to enhance public safety or wellbeing”(p. 141). At the time of Michael Brown’s death, these “fines and forfeitures” surpassed property taxes in the city of Ferguson, making up a full 20% of the municipal revenue.
It is within the context of this over policing by a predominately white police force over a predominately African American municipality that the events of August 9, 2014 occurred.
At approximately noon on August 9, 2014, Officer Darren Wilson drove up to two young men walking in the middle of the Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri. At the age of 18, Michael Brown had graduated from an alternative education offered at Normandy High School program eight days earlier, and he was due to begin a training program for heating and cooling repair at a local community college in two days. He was walking with his 22-year-old friend Dorian Johnson, and they had nearly reached their destination when they encountered Officer Wilson. After the initial conversation where Officer Wilson directed the two men to step out of the street, the narrative of events of what followed varies widely among sources. According to police communications and verified accounts of events, the entire fatal encounter took less than 90 seconds from the first interaction to the death of Michael Brown.
According to Dorian Johnson, Brown and he acknowledged the officer’s directions to step out of the road and told the officer that they were nearly at their destination; the officer pulled forward before shifting the police vehicle into reverse. The vehicle returned to block the path of Brown and Johnson; Officer Wilson attempted to swing the car door open, but the door hit the two pedestrians rebounding closed. At which point, Johnson claims that Wilson reached out through the window and grabbed Michael Brown around the throat. There was a struggle that Johnson described as a sort of “tug of war” between the two, where Brown was not attempting to reach for the officer’s gun but was instead attempting to escape Wilson’s chokehold. At which point, Wilson drew his weapon giving a partial warning to Brown before shooting and hitting him in the hand. After the gunshot, Johnson claims that both he and Michael Brown attempted to flee from the vehicle. Officer Wilson exited the vehicle and fired at them as they ran; according to Johnson, Michael Brown then stopped and turned to face the officer with his hands raised (one of which was raised “as much as possible” due to being wounded by Wilson’s earlier gunshot). Johnson said he witnessed Michael Brown say, “I don’t have a gun” and as he attempted to repeat the line, Office Wilson fired several more times, ultimately killing Michael Brown. Throughout his account of events, Dorian Johnson described Officer Wilson as the aggressor, not only escalating the interactions by cursing and yelling derogatory statements at them but also refusing to acknowledge compliance from Brown.
Officer Wilson’s account of events notably paints a different picture of the interaction. According to his narrative, he approached the two pedestrians in his vehicle and directed them to walk on the sidewalk, at which point they informed him that they were nearly at their destination. As he proceeded to drive away from them, Wilson claims to have heard Michael Brown say “f--- what you have to say.” In response, Officer Wilson reversed his vehicle into the path of the two black men; he then attempted to open his vehicle door but claims he was repeatedly blocked by Michael Brown who repeatedly challenged him, offering profanities. Wilson claimed that Brown then started punching him through the open window of the vehicle, and unable to gain control of the situation he drew his weapon and pointed it at the unarmed teenager. At that warning, Wilson claimed that Brown effectively dared him to shoot and reached to take the officer’s gun; the two struggled with two shots being fired, one of which hitting Michael Brown in the hand. Brown and Johnson then ran from the gunshots, and Wilson claims that he stepped out of the vehicle and directed Michael Brown to stop, turn around, and lay on the ground. He fired several shots at which point Michael Brown turned around to face him in the street. According to Officer Wilson, at this point Brown made some sort of “grunt” and began running towards him; in response, he claims to have fired a couple warning shots and then shot Michael Brown twice in the head. Throughout his account of the incident, Officer Wilson described a hostile situation in which his attempts to deescalate the situation were undercut by an aggressive Michael Brown; Wilson’s narrative rationalizes Michael Brown’s death as self-defense.
The two conflicting narratives of events pose a problem.
Further the strategic discrediting of any narratives or witnesses that conflicted with Officer Wilson’s recounting of events reveal both a racist and systemic bias against black narratives—especially as the same scrutiny and intensity was not applied equally to both narratives.
The immediate investigation of Michael Brown’s death raises several procedural red flags.
For example, despite the medical examiner arriving at the scene at 2:30 p.m., Michael Brown’s body was left lying in the street for nearly four hours, and although it was standard practice for the medical examiner to photograph the body for evidence, they did not take their own measurements or pictures at the scene—instead choosing to rely upon those pictures supplied by the St. Louis County Police Department. Similarly unusual, the gun that Officer Wilson discharged in the incident was submitted into evidence by Wilson himself; additionally, his initial interviews with investigators were not taped, departing from standard departmental practices. Beyond the irregularities in forensic and investigative practices, the manner in which information was released to the public intentionally muddled the narrative of the incident.
On August 15, 2014, the Ferguson Police Department released a packet of information to the public regarding the death of Michael Brown. Though the department claimed that this release of information was in the spirit of transparency, the contents of the report went beyond the scope of the actual incident and intentionally confused the facts of Michael Brown’s death while reaffirming Officer Wilson’s narrative.
The contents of the report contained the name of Officer Darren Wilson, his narrative of the incident stated as undisputed fact, and a video showing Michael Brown and Dorian Johnson at a local convenience store not far from the Canfield Drive (Chappell, 2014). Within that video recording, Michael Brown purportedly argues with the clerk and steals a pack of cigarillos—with the timestamps indicating that this event occurred approximately ten minutes before the fateful encounter with Officer Wilson. The Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson said during the news conference releasing the packet to the public—and this was later confirmed during Wilson’s own testimony to the grand jury—that the robbery had “nothing to do” with the initial stop, indicating that Brown and Johnson were stopped because they were in the middle of the street (Hennessy-Fiske, Pearce, and Susman 2014). Jay Nixon, the governor of Missouri at the time, reacted to the release of the video calling it “misleading” and intentionally “disparaging” of Michael Brown’s character (Walters and Swaine, 2014). Both Governor Nixon and the U.S. Department of Justice criticized the release of the video as inflaming tensions and purposely clouding the events.
On August 20, 2014, a grand jury who had been impaneled earlier that year began hearing the case State of Missouri v. Darren Wilson in order to determine whether there was probable cause that a crime had been committed. The St. Louis County Prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, approached the grand jury hearing seemingly already having decided not to indict Officer Wilson, and the grand jury process was atypical in terms of procedure.
First, the grand jury took 25 days over the course of several months (rather than the typical few days) to review evidence, to hear testimony, and to deliberate (Cassell, 2014). Second, all the proceedings were transcribed, and evidence and exhibits were prepared for eventual public release (which is not standard practice regarding grand jury proceedings in Missouri). Finally, the grand jury heard all the evidence rather than the curated or vetted evidence that is typically presented by prosecutors. This last decision reveals a particularly insidious bias as there were many “witnesses” to the incident brought before the grand jury to testify who in fact did not witness Michael Brown’s death; by bringing all of these supposed witnesses forward as possible counter narratives to Officer Wilson’s claim rather than vetting their claims in advance (as it typically done in most grand jury processes), it effectively presented Wilson’s narrative as stable and any other narrative that might disagree as less credible. In McCulloch’s words: “I thought it was important to present anybody and everybody, and some that were, yes, clearly not telling the truth, no question about it” (Woolf 2014). Further, some analyses of the prosecutor’s questioning of witnesses and narratives revealed biases within the presented case; according to The New York Times,
The gentle questioning of Officer Wilson revealed in the transcripts, and the sharp challenges prosecutors made to witnesses whose accounts seemed to contradict his narrative, have led some to question whether the process was objective (Bosman, Robertson, Eckhol, and Oppel 2014).
Further, the transcripts show prosecutors failing to push against the apparent inconsistencies from Wilson and other law enforcement officials, seemingly providing an easier cross examination and follow up questions (Bosman, Robertson, Eckhol, and Oppel 2014). Taking these procedural biases into account, it is not surprising that on November 24, 2014, the St. Louis County Prosecutor’s office decided not to indict Officer Wilson.
Michael Brown’s death led to almost immediate public response, and those protests continued from the date of his death nearly continuously through the announcement on November 24, 2024 that St. Louis County Prosecutors would not prosecute Wilson.
In Ferguson, Missouri (and in the St. Louis area), most of the protests were peaceful; though there were several instances in which the protests later in the evenings descended into civil unrest and vandalism. Protesters have claimed that the escalation was in direct response to the police department’s overreaction and over-policing of peaceful protesters, including instituting and enforcing a curfew, blatant aggression and insensitivity towards residents, and their militarized response to peacefully gathered crowds. The coverage of the protests in the news often provided a political indicator of party and vested interest, with many news outlets and cable news networks highlighting not the incident in which the young African American teen was killed by a police officer, nor the majority of the protests which were peaceful, but instead focusing upon those moments of civil unrest (Gordon 2019, p. 131). Though strategically discredited by the prosecutors during the grand jury proceedings, several witnesses claimed that Michael Brown had raised his hands to show Officer Wilson that he was unarmed before he was shot. In response, almost organically from that narrative, the chant “Hands up, don’t Shoot!” sprang into the local and national conversation (Corley, 2015).
On October 13, 2014, a group of 1,500 protesters marched up Grand Boulevard.
These protesters were initially blocked from entering Saint Louis University (SLU) by a row of riot police. When the group of protestors was met on the other side of the police line by a second group of protesters, the police retreated and the two groups merged, marching down the center of West Pine and occupying the public area around the clock tower. This group of peaceful protesters effected a sit-in around the clock tower–eventually known as “OccupySLU”; it lasted for six days. Though the group was technically directly protesting the treatment of African American communities in the St. Louis region, they wanted SLU to take action and effect systematic change in the University’s policies and community engagement (Kuziez, 2021). The resulting “Clock Tower Accords” included thirteen action points for both SLU’s internal policies and its institutional commitment to justice in the St. Louis area. As described on the University’s official website,
The Accords are a very real, very impactful way for [Saint Louis University] to live our Jesuit mission. They address college readiness and affordability, neighborhood investment and revitalization, and the extraordinary research-proven benefits that diversity, equity and inclusion provide to everyday work and family life. They further our goal to become a national model for inclusive excellence and innovative community engagement for urban academic research institutions. (Saint Louis University).